Arturo Islas' The Rain God: An Alternative Tradition

Abstract

C HICANo author Arturo Islas' The Rain God, A Desert Tale' belongs to a contemporary tradition of autobiographical fiction by Latino men and women that has emerged from workingclass Hispanophone communities, for example, Chicano and Puerto Rican. In their search to define different identities, Chicano and Chicana authors recall an earlier tradition of American immigrant authors who, at the turn of the century, found themselves on the other side of the dominant ethnic identity, namely, the Western European, AngloSaxon, or Nordic English-speaking American. This generation of others whose families immigrated from southern and eastern, not northern or western, Europe formulated a literary tradition in the 1930S different from the modernism of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. ' However, important differences must be noted when viewing Chicano and U.S. Puerto Rican authors against the background of this alternative tradition of the 1930s. Chicano and nuyorican3 writers belong to a recent literary tradition of immigrant and migrant peoples from countries of non-European origin.